Introduction: Pat Hayes

I have been involved with cognitive science and AI for about 30 
years, and have a particular interest in formal semantics of 
representational notations of all kinds, and the formal expression of 
'naive' knowledge (aka "common sense").  My graduate training was in 
computational logic. I also have some background in logic programming 
and the semantics of programming languages, and a long time ago I was 
an active LISP programmer.  At various times I have been a computer 
science professor (specializing in AI/KR and programming languages), 
a philosophy professor (specializing in philosophical logic and 
philosophy of cognition) and an industrial researcher (at 
Schlumberger and Xerox-PARC).  At present I do grant-supported 
(DARPA, NASA, Army and Navy) research on various topics connected 
with knowledge representation, new computer architectures and machine 
inference. I am currently a member of the W3C RDF Core and Webont 
working groups, and editor of the RDF/RDFS semantics; I am also 
active in other logic-based standardization efforts such as the 
common logic group http://cl.tamu.edu/ .

My own main research interest in the semantic web is the ways in 
which making KR ubiquitous and 'public' will influence the design of 
KR languages themselves. So far this has not happened to any great 
extent, but I think that it will, and things like 'public meaning' 
are typical of the challenging semantic issues which arise. (Another 
is clarifying the nature of 'representations' of 'resources' on the 
Web more generally; another is designing ways to negotiate 
differences in intended meaning and to reconcile differing formal 
usages.)

Although I have a reputation for defending formal logic and formal 
techniques more generally (and once wrote a paper with the title "in 
defense of logic"), I only defend and use them when they help clarify 
things. I am not of the opinion that logics found in textbooks have 
some special intellectual status or that it is sinful to change or 
adapt them to new purposes. We should be in command of our 
representation semantics, not slaves to them.

Pat Hayes
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Received on Monday, 8 September 2003 14:15:33 UTC